Soul Screamers Volume Two

by Rachel Vincent

  I laughed. “A less touchy-feely way to remain in physical contact? Let me know what you come up with.”

  We were halfway to the door beneath a rickety-looking set of stairs when the only other door off the foyer squealed open without warning. Nash froze.

  A child stood in the threshold, shrouded by shadows. Her silhouette wore a dress and had long hair. She did not move.

  “She can see us,” Nash whispered.

  “No she can’t.” I tugged him toward what had to be the basement door, but he refused to move.

  “Tod, she can see us. I think she can hear us, too. Why else would she be staring at us?”

  “She’s not staring at us. Some kids are just weird. You were. Come on.” I pulled him again, and he shuffled forward. The girl stepped out of her doorway and into the dimly-lit foyer, and with a jolt of shock, I realized Nash was right. The child was staring at us.

  With her right eye.

  Her left eye was gone. The scars puckering the empty socket and bisecting her eyelid said it had been clawed out.

  My chills ran so cold and deep my bones felt like icicles.

  The child blinked at us for another few seconds, while my chill bumps grew fatter and my confusion swelled. Then understanding surfaced and I exhaled, relieved. “The child oracle.” That time I whispered, because if she could see us, surely she could hear us, too. And Sabine wasn’t kidding when she’d called the poor kid tragic. “She can see things others can’t. Including us, evidently. Do you think she did that to herself?” I couldn’t stop staring at her empty eye socket.

  Nash glanced at me, then turned back to the girl. “Syrie?” he whispered.

  She blinked, and her hand brushed a lacy dress with holes worn through at the seams. The material was so old the color was no longer identifiable. She seemed to belong to the previous century.

  “Can you hear us?” I said. The child pushed long, matted hair back from her shoulder and blinked again. I turned to Nash. “I don’t think she talks.”

  “Well, that certainly lowers the chances of her ratting us out. Come on.” My brother tugged me toward the door beneath the stairs. Syrie watched as we opened it, then almost walked face-first into a rack of musty, outdated coats.

  I groaned. “Unless the basement is actually located in Narnia, I don’t think this is the way.”

  When we turned, Syrie lifted one hand and pointed toward the kitchen. I followed her aim to a door we’d overlooked on our way in, next to the ancient yellow refrigerator.

  “We walked right past it,” Nash whispered, disgusted, and when I turned to thank Syrie, she pulled her right hand from behind her back and held a piece of paper out to me.

  I hesitated, unnerved by the creepiest child I’d ever seen—Levi had just been outdone by the girl with one eye. Then I accepted the paper.

  It took a second for me to make sense of the drawing in the dim foyer, but when the picture came into focus, I almost dropped Nash’s hand out of shock. “Holy shit, look at this!” But my brother was already staring at the page, and when his hand tightened around mine, I knew he understood.

  Syrie had drawn the dragon charm. She couldn’t have been more than nine years old, and I hadn’t even told her what we were looking for, much less asked for her help, yet there it was, drawn with stunning skill and perspective well beyond her years. Hell, well beyond my years.

  The dragon charm had been threaded onto a chain—Silver? Gold?—and draped over the neck of a human skeleton, hanging from a noose. The scene was creepy and grotesque, but Syrie had drawn the whole thing in amazing detail, in three shades of blue. The charm seemed to sparkle on the page, and the skeleton was rich with highlights and shadow. In the background was the suggestion of...stuff. Lots of stuff. The ocean of junk Sabine had told us about. Which meant...

  “This is in the basement?” I tore my gaze from the drawing long enough to glance at Syrie again, and again she pointed at the kitchen door behind us. “Thank you!” I turned toward the kitchen, but Nash pulled me back.

  “Thanks, Syrie.” He reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled out the small box of crayons we’d stopped for on the way. Suddenly the purchase made sense. “Enjoy.”

  Syrie’s only eye lit up, and I realized it was a brilliant green. She must have been beautiful, when she’d had two of them. She snatched the box of crayons, then shuffled backward into her room. A second later, something clicked, and a lamp illuminated part of a dusty, mostly empty bedroom, where the child now sat at a small table, already drawing with one of her new crayons.

  The lamp didn’t shed much light, but what we could see was unreal. Every inch of Syrie’s room was covered with drawings. The walls. The floor. The front of her old, wooden dresser. The entire room was a mural, with hundreds of pictures in dozens of different styles, bleeding one into the next. They were stunning. Syrie’s talent was almost as miraculous as the rest of her was tragic.

  If we hadn’t been trying to avoid detection from the harpies, I could have spent hours staring at them. Only the thought of Kaylee’s mother’s soul, still stuck in limbo, got me moving.

  Nash

  When I opened my eyes, I stood with one foot in a stainless steel roasting pan and the other sticking through a half-rotten purple teddy bear, of county-fair quality.

  “Sorry, I was aiming for the steps,” Tod said, his right hand still damp in my left.

  “There’s no one in here. Let’s just find the pendant and go.” I tried to let go of his hand, but his grip only tightened.

  “Wait. If you become corporeal right now, for all I know, your feet may be melded to a teddy bear and a steel pan. Come here.” He tugged me backward, and I almost tripped over the bottom step—we’d landed less than two feet from the staircase.

  On the tread, my brother finally let go of my hand. “Okay, now you have to whisper,” he said. “And don’t step on anything loud.”

  But I was still staring at his feet. “If you’re incorporeal, why aren’t you falling through the tread?”

  “The same reason we didn’t fall through the floor upstairs. It’s a boundary. I can walk through closed doors and climb through closed windows, because they’re meant to function as pathways. Entrances and exits. But I can’t walk through walls or fall through floors because they’re meant to be barriers. Boundaries. Afterlife physics has as much to do with intent as with physical properties.”

  “That’s weird. Yet it kind of makes sense.”

  Tod laughed. “Perhaps the only thing my brother and my afterlife have in common.”

  “Ha ha. Let’s find that skeleton and get out of here.” But that turned out to be easier said than done. That creepy-ass basement, a hoarder’s paradise, held half a dozen skeletons dangling from the rafters, each decorated from skull to distal phalanges—thank you, freshman biology—with stolen jewelry. At a glance, I couldn’t tell which wore the dragon pendant.

  “I’ll take the ones on the left, you take the ones on the right,” Tod said, and when I nodded, he took off through—literally through—the drifts of junk on his way to the nearest skeleton.

  I had to pick my way through the debris slowly, careful not to step on anything loud or bump into anything that might fall over.

  “No luck on this one,” Tod said, before I was even halfway to my first skeleton. I stepped over an open toolbox and kicked aside a pile of clothes and suddenly found myself face-to-empty-eye-sockets with the first skeleton on my side of the basement.

  “You think these are real?” I whispered.

  “This isn’t a haunted house. Of course they’re real.”

  The bones had been painstakingly wired together at every joint, then hung from an intricately knotted noose tied to the support beams overhead. Just stitching the bones together must have taken forever, and as sick as the whole thing was, I had to admit it was done well. But there was no mistaking the insult to injury represented by the jewelry.

  Those sick birds were using some poor person’s bones
as a mannequin to display their stolen goods! The skeleton wore a tiara, a necklace, two bracelets, a jeweled belt, two anklets, and four rings. There was even a pair of sparkly, dangly earrings glued to the sides of its skull.

  The whole thing was disgusting. But there was no dragon pendant.

  It took me several more minutes to get to the second skeleton without making any noise, and by the time I got there, Tod had already examined all three of his.

  “There’s no necklace on this one,” I whispered, after a visual examination of the bones hanging in front of me. “It must be on the other one.”

  Tod beat me to the last dangling skeleton. “No luck. This pendant’s a lizard, not a dragon. And there’s no soul in it.”

  “You can tell that from looking?” I squinted, trying to see the pendant lying against the bare sternum in front of him, but it was too far away, and the basement was too dim.

  “I’m a reaper. I can tell that without looking.”

  “But Syrie’s drawing—” I stepped back, and my shoe crunched into something on the floor. When I looked down, I saw a thin silver chain, half-hidden in the sleeve of a winter coat that hadn’t been new since the 70s. “Hang on.” I bent and pulled the chain free from the sleeve it’d snagged on, and there was the dragon pendant, cast in profile, with a grime-covered ruby for its left eye. I rubbed my thumb across the stone to clean it, and it glittered in the little available light. “I got it. Can you feel it?” I glanced at my brother, searching his expression. “Is it her?”

  Tod was at my side in an instant, standing with one foot sunk through the ratty coat, the other piercing the face of a broken porcelain doll. He nodded slowly, staring at the pendant. “It’s her. It has to be. She feels so...lonely.” His irises churned slowly and he exhaled, and some bit of tension in him seemed to ease. “But she’s not in pain.” His pale brows furrowed and his gaze found mine. “I wish Kaylee were here. I wish she’d known her mother wasn’t in pain. She deserved to know that.”

  “You can’t change the past,” I said, still staring at the dragon’s ruby eye. My brother could do battle with hellions, and travel between dimensions, and bring the dead back to life. He’d made Kaylee happy, when I’d only made her miserable. But even Tod couldn’t reverse time in its course.

  He couldn’t bring her back.

  I couldn’t feel her mother’s soul. I held it in my hand, yet felt nothing but cold metal and grime, and for the first time since Kaylee died, I was jealous of my brother. Of what he could feel and I could not. This last piece of Kaylee. This connection to her.

  Maybe that was a fitting end—in death as in life, he could truly feel her and I could not.

  “Let’s go give her peace.” I wrapped the chain around my right palm, the dragon dangling below my fist, just as the door at the top of the stairs flew open. Light footsteps thumped on wood, and a guy in dark jeans appeared at the top of the steps. His chest was bare, and the tips of two sharply pointed, leathery black wings peeked over his shoulders.

  Tod’s brows arched and a wicked grin lifted the corners of his mouth. “Oh, good! I was starting to think we’d have to leave without facing mortal danger!” He blinked out of sight, and a second later appeared on the landing next to the harpy, towering over him by several inches.

  “Who the hell are you?” the harpy demanded, without even glancing at Tod, and with sudden insight, I realized Tod was visible only to me.

  “Troy?” I said, and with a sudden blur of motion and series of light footsteps, he suddenly stood on the bottom tread, studying my face, his foot talons gripping the edge of the step.

  “Do I know you?” He was thin, and shorter than I’d expected—if we were on equal footing, I’d be a head taller—but his teeth had wickedly sharp points, and his fingertips ended in sharp, thick claws. And he was quick.

  “Holy shit, he moves fast,” Tod said, appearing on the tread above the harpy, and I realized we were thinking the same thing. Whatever this guy lacked in size, he made up for in speed. And in scary-sharp teeth and claws. “Sabine said their bones are hollow, to allow for flight.” His head tilted as he examined the harpy from behind, and I recognized bold fascination in the twist of his irises. “But she failed to mention these talons. Good for gripping, but probably hell on footwear.”

  Great. Tod wanted to examine the man-bird. That was fine for him, since the harpy couldn’t attack what he couldn’t see or hear. But both Darcy’s soul and I were still vulnerable.

  “We have a mutual...foe,” I said, careful not to look at my brother and give away his presence. “Thane.”

  The harpy’s dark brows furrowed over small, black eyes while Tod squatted on the step behind him, stealthily examining his wings. “I don’t know anyone named Thane, and that doesn’t tell me why you’re in my basement.”

  “Who’s down there?” a screechy, feminine voice called from upstairs, and Troy stepped closer to me as he answered, his talon-toes nimbly gripping every piece of junk he stepped on. His balance was flawless.

  “Just some thief.” Troy’s voice was almost as screechy as hers. “Nea, get the girls and come down. Dinner came to us tonight.”

  “I’m not a thief,” I said, and that time I looked right at my brother, trying to signal the end to his game. One harpy was good fun, but four hungry mythological birds at once could mean a feast, with me as the main course. As soon as Tod made physical contact, he could blink us out of there. “You stole this from Thane. The reaper.” I held up the pendant. “I’m taking it back to the rightful owner.” Sort of.

  Troy’s brows bunched even lower and his nostrils flared. His wings tensed and seemed to retract toward his spine. Then he threw them open with a sound like sails unfurling in the wind and Tod jumped back, startled. Suddenly the man-harpy seemed to take up half the basement.

  His wings were huge and black, framed with bony ridges and points like a bat’s. But the left hung lower—crippled—and I doubted it was actually functional.

  “Sabine did good work,” Tod said, ignoring my pointed glances while he studied Troy’s wings. “There’s thick scar tissue and pronounced stiffness. I don’t think he can get airborne.”

  But he still had claws.

  Troy didn’t so much fly as swoop, and an instant later he was on me. My back hit the cluttered floor, and something hard dug into my spine. Claws ripped my shirt and scored my chest. Wings beat the air above me, and panic surged through my bloodstream, lighting my nerve endings on fire.

  “Damn it! Hang on, I’m coming!” Tod shouted, and in my panic, it took me a second to understand why he was on the steps again, instead of pulling the winged psycho off me—if he’d become corporeal while he was standing through the sea of junk, it would have become part of him. So he’d blinked back to the steps—a psychic barrier, like floors and doors—where he could reclaim his physical form, unaltered.

  I threw up my hands to protect my face, trying to decide where best to punch the harpy, and the pendant dangling from my hand caught his attention.

  “Mine!” Troy grasped for the dragon pendant and nearly ripped my arm off with it.

  “Let him have it!” Tod shouted, trudging through the junk on the floor, now corporeal, but still visible only to me, except for the path he cleared with each step. “I don’t need the charm, I just need the soul.”

  I tried to let Troy have the dragon, but the chain was wound around my hand. And with the harpy alternately trying to claw my eyes out and rip my arm off, Tod couldn’t blink me out without taking Troy with us.

  More footsteps tapped on the stairs, and through my fear and panic, I registered two new bodies and two more sets of leathery wings, which made the basement feel claustrophobic, even beyond the scope of the sea of junk.

  “Save some for us!” one girl shrieked, while another wordlessly cheered Troy on.

  I desperately blocked blow after blow, while Troy’s claws raked across my forearms and my chin, aiming for my eyes. Or maybe for my throat.

  “Nash,
let it go!” Tod shouted, still trudging toward us, glancing around for a weapon.

  “I can’t!” I yelled back, and Troy paused in his assault.

  “Can’t what?” he demanded. He still couldn’t see my brother.

  I sucked in a deep breath. “I’m trying to give you your damn pendant back!” I shouted, when I could breathe again. “Here! Take it, and we’ll get out of your...roost.”

  On the edge of my vision, Tod stood perfectly still, his steady gaze trained on the pendant. He was trying to remove the soul from it, which hadn’t been possible while I was waving it around, trying to fight Troy off.

  I’d been in my fair share of fights—both on the field and off—but I’d never fought anyone with claws before. It was like trying to fight the love child of Wolverine and Freddy Krueger.

  “We?” Troy hauled me up, revealing far more strength than someone his size should have had—Netherworld genetics working against me yet again. “Who else is here?”

  “No one. It was a figure of speech. I meant me and...my ego,” I said, and Tod laughed out loud, his concentration blown again. “Here. You can have your necklace and I’ll be on my way.” I unwound the chain from my chafed palm and handed it to the harpy, trying to ignore the stinging claw marks on my arms.

  “Well, you’re half-right.” Troy tossed the pendant over his shoulder and the brunette harpy caught it in one fist. “What do you say, ladies? Should we play with our food, or just eat it?”

  “Play!” The redhead shouted from the foot of the stairs. I hadn’t even seen her come in. The two other girl harpies glanced at her, then shouted in agreement.

  Troy turned back to me, and I ducked, then sidestepped him. He lunged for me, and I lurched toward the brunette. She screeched and stumbled backward. I snatched the chain from her hand and immediately threw it to Tod.

  “Catch!”

  Tod’s hand shot up, and the pendant landed in it, the chain bouncing off his forearm. As his fingers curled around the dragon, Troy and the brunette each grabbed one of my arms.